Free-form spirituality meets ever-present reality in Botis Seva’s follow-up.
Botis Seva and his company ‘Far from the Norm’ have burst onto the contemporary dance scene with their hip-hop, free form, theatrically infused dance pieces. Particularly during the beginning of the 2020s, Seva’s output has been highlighted as some of the best coming out of London and now having been recognised as an Associate Artist of Sadler’s Wells, Seva has cemented himself as a heavyweight in the UK’s theatre dance world.
There has been much anticipation for the follow-up to BLKDOG, Norm’s 2022 hip hop dance piece, which was widely praised, exploring the ‘vicious connection of how self-discovery leads to self-destruction’. Seva makes a significant departure from this, as his 2024 show ‘Until We Sleep’ leans heavily into the theatrical and less into the hip hop. Watching at the Lowry in Salford, we follow a warrior (Victoria Shulungu) grappling with her symbolic power over those around her and her impending responsibility to her spiritual forefathers. It ultimately explores the threshold between spirituality and reality, what we withstand while we live and what we toil for when we die.
As the music becomes less rhythmic, so does Seva’s choreography. The seven performers often move mechanically, Torben Lars Sylvest’s creaking soundscapes pushing them along. For me, this reflects expectation, that need to keep moving to fulfil responsibility. At times this is ominous, a repeating motif of what sounds like a door opening slowly and painfully – is this the passageway opening through the threshold, a blurring of spiritual and physical landscapes?
While the sound is certainly effective, Tom Visser’s lighting design stands peerless to anything else. Mercurial yet expertly prescribed, Visser never fails to find just the right illumination for the right meaning. Dramatic pools of smoky light appear and disappear, hues of gold and blue rise slowly and reveal pockets of the stage not seen before. A particular highlight is the opening sequence of different tableaus dramatically appear in and out of vision.
Visser’s bars of lights cascade down the walls of the space. They are incredibly versatile, shifting their identity constantly. Raindrops, the night sky, the voice of an ancient tree god, it felt like these bars could do anything. But most importantly, they physicalise the threshold, the spiritual gods and demons (characterised fantastically by Ryan Laight’s feathered and monstrous costumes) often operating in the murky depths behind the barrier, whilst their presence locks the performers in the performance space.
So, although the piece’s creative features work well in tandem, the piece’s questions feel just too hard to grasp. Not only are there multiple strands to understand, but the choreography is often too abstract and complex to offer any visceral response, instead eliciting an intellectual one. Unfortunately, the most effective moments often come when Seva’s choreography isn’t tethered so much to meaning and become less stylistic. These were often up-tempo where sound, light, and dance gloriously harmonised, and the audience wasn’t subjected to so much drama and reflection. Often, it’s nice just to experience the beauty and wonder of a good dance sequence. It feels like this piece is really trying to say something universal to the human experience, but it just isn’t stark enough.